Does pragmatics beat syntax? Evidence from focus accent placement in the semi-spontaneous speech of Italian learners of German

In this paper, we investigate the prosodic marking of information structure by Italian L1 learners of German. We analyze two different contexts with non-final focus accents, i.e. narrow and broad focus contexts, mainly on sentence level while most studiesdiscussing post-focal de-accentuation are restricted to noun phrases.For Italian learners, non-final placement of focus accents is likely to cause problems, given that in their L1, phonetic prominence is normally assigned to the last constituent in the verbal phrase. The analysis shows that in semi-spontaneous speech production there is evidence for the hypothesis that pragmatics does not “beat” syntax in prosodic acquisition.